299 years ago today, something happened which changed the world. On 13th August 1727, a group of mostly Moravian refugees living in the village of Herrnhut in Germany walked about a mile down the hill to a special communion service which had been arranged in the neighbouring village of Berthelsdorf.
In the 5 years since they began to arrive, things had not been going well in Herrnhut. The community was bitterly divided between different factions and personalities, things had been said and done which were difficult to forgive, and the place looked nothing like the Christ-centred community which many had hoped to build. Admitted over that summer things had begun to change, starting with a firm intervention from the young lord of the manor Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf. A season of reconciliation and a new start had followed, but the weight of the previous few years still hung heavily over the community.
As Zinzendorf began a prayer of confession in the small church at Berthelsdorf, the pregnant heavens over Herrnhut finally burst open and the power and glory of God descended on the assembled people. The sense of God’s presence simply went off the scale – beyond words, beyond description, beyond understanding. Every account struggles and fails to convey adequately the experience which they shared. The Spirit of God came like a windstorm: mighty, rushing, irresistible. The love and holiness of God touched them like a firestream: heart-warming, dangerous, life-branding.
The Herrnhut diary for that day encapsulates the life-changing nature of the events of 13 August: “Those who previously could not tolerate one another now stood in the graveyard in front of the church and embraced, swearing promises of true friendship; and so the whole congregation came back to Herrnhut as newborn children.”
13th August is still celebrated each year as the anniversary of the ‘Moravian Pentecost’. That same group of broken and divided people went on to become one of the most remarkable movements of day-and-night-prayer, church renewal, and global missions in history. At the heart of this movement were the members of the original Order of the Mustard Seed, who saw their commitments to be True, to be Kind, and to Go fulfilled in ways that they could barely have imagined.
As we remember those events today, let’s pray that the same Spirit which came upon them would fill our own lives afresh too. We are greatly inspired by their works and witness, but our desire is to take our own place in the ongoing mustard-seed story of God’s kingdom filling the earth. For that to happen we need to be reconciled, united, and empowered every bit as much as they did.
Quotes taken from The Lord of the Ring: a journey in search of Count Zinzendorf, pub. Muddy Pearl